Oh, dear. Poor Ricky. Poor, poor li'l misunderstood Ricky.
Senator in Heated Exchange With Parents of Gay Children (NY Times, May 2, 2003, registration required): Four parents of gay children had a fiery private exchange tonight with Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. The meeting did not go well, and Mr. Santorum, who has infuriated gays by likening homosexuality to incest and bigamy, left in a hurry, tripping over a chair, the parents said. "What we tried to do in this meeting was reach him on a human level, and we found no humanity there," said Melina Waldo, a former constituent of Mr. Santorum who lives in Haddonfield, N.J. She said he was "condescending, belligerent, argumentative and arrogant." [...] The meeting, with a heated exchange, ran 30 minutes, the parents said. The parents, Mrs. Kirschner said, insisted that the comments were hurtful to their children. Mr. Santorum, they said, wanted to talk about legal terms, insisting that he was just arguing against a right to privacy and that his remarks had been taken out of context.
The interesting thing is, Santorum is correct about the context of his comments. He was not originally speaking about homosexuality; the AP reporter steered it in that direction. Santorum was talking about the right to privacy itself. The plain fact is, what he actually said was even worse. He doesn't believe in a right to privacy, period. That was quite clear in the original remarks (and, indeed, in this very article). It doesn't have much, if anything, to do with anyone being gay or not; he simply feels that the government should be able to dictate everyone's private lives.
Don't believe that? Let's go to the original comments, shall we? Let's shall.
Sen. Rick Santorum's comments on homosexuality in an AP interview: [...]
SANTORUM: ... Again, it goes back to this moral relativism, which is very accepting of a variety of different lifestyles. And if you make the case that if you can do whatever you want to do, as long as it's in the privacy of your own home, this "right to privacy," then why be surprised that people are doing things that are deviant within their own home? If you say, there is no deviant as long as it's private, as long as it's consensual, then don't be surprised what you get. You're going to get a lot of things that you're sending signals that as long as you do it privately and consensually, we don't really care what you do. And that leads to a culture that is not one that is nurturing and necessarily healthy. I would make the argument in areas where you have that as an accepted lifestyle, don't be surprised that you get more of it.
AP: The right to privacy lifestyle?
SANTORUM: The right to privacy lifestyle. [...] I have no problem with homosexuality. I have a problem with homosexual acts. As I would with acts of other, what I would consider to be, acts outside of traditional heterosexual relationships. And that includes a variety of different acts, not just homosexual. [...] The idea is that the state doesn't have rights to limit individuals' wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire. And we're seeing it in our society.
So basically, his position is, the government absolutely has the right to dictate what you do in your bedroom. Yes, YOU, Joe and Jane "we only have missionary position heterosexual sex, no toys or anything" Smith. He's perfectly fine with, say, Alabama's ban on vibrators despite the fact that the courts have repeatedly said that Alabama simply can't do that. (He wouldn't allow the courts to say that Alabama can't do that, you see.)
All THAT said .... Santorum is, in fact, absolutely correct about the textual origination of the right to privacy. The Constitution itself makes no direct statement as to the right to privacy or any lack thereof. The Griswold v. Connecticut decision -- which seems to have been written as it was to serve the specific purpose of supporting the then-still-forthcoming Roe v. Wade decision -- states that there are rights "penumbrating" madly out from those enumerated in the Constitution; that these rights can be inferred from those in the Bill of Rights, and one of these is the right to privacy. Now, mind, I happen to think that up to a point, the Constitution's drafters may have taken the right to privacy for granted -- the fact that government agents cannot be quartered in your home without your consent, and especially the fact that they are not allowed to search your home absent a warrant and some sort of reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing would definitely imply that. But, frankly, Griswold is a wretchedly badly written decision; it's clear that the justices simply thought that Connecticut had no right to restrict access to birth control as it did, but couldn't figure out how to get there without, shall we say, a fairly elastic approach to the constitution. It almost certainly would not have been decided that way in today's Court; they most likely would simply have rejected the appeal from the state supreme court.
In any event, Santorum won't lose any position, he won't be censured by the president, and it's really a very small tempest in a very big teapot, so to speak. And all of that is, one hopes, my first and last word on l'affaire Santorum.
Posted by iain at May 02, 2003 03:48 PM
